Around and Around

Pushing off a perfect 1917 Smith Flyer

Feature Article from Hemmings Motor News

It looks like a sled with wheels and, as the tale goes, drives a lot like one, too. Instead of chuckling, however, recognize that this vehicle is a gleaming platinum-plated piece of American automotive history and has the hardware to back it up. Moreover, this 1917 Smith Flyer has a direct connection to a very famous name in American manufacturing.
First, the car: It's an extremely light oak-and-metal frame powered by an externally attached, gasoline-fueled drive wheel. The entire system, if you will, was produced in Milwaukee by the A. O. Smith Corporation. Before this, Smith built bicycles. Contingent to that, it acquired the U.S. manufacturing rights for the Wall Auto Wheel, a British creation that strapped to a bike's frame and powered its chain with a one-cylinder, air-cooled gasoline engine.
Smith considerably improved the Auto Wheel, not just by renaming it. It created stouter disc wheel and drove it directly off the engine's tiny two-lobe camshaft using a reduction-gear mechanism instead of the Wall wheel's chain. One wing-shaped crankcase side casting bolts to the Flyer's frame and is hollow to let the exhaust pipe pass through. The other functions as a wet sump for a cup or so of oil. A turning lever on the dash selects between two throttle settles, idle and wide open. The long lever on the cart's floorboard is the clutch, you could say: Give it a yank and the whole Auto Wheel pivots off the ground via a rod. That's how you take the Flyer in and out of gear, only there's no gear.
A.O. Smith sold about $500,000 worth of Auto Wheels at $60 a pop between 1916 and 1918, many of them pre-mounted to Smith Flyers, before it sold the rights for both to its Wisconsin neighbor, Briggs & Stratton, which continued selling the Flyer through 1919. Smith continued as an industry supplier by making pressed-steel frames before transitioning to lined water tanks and, today, making high-efficiency residential water heaters. More notably for car people, the 1hp Smith engine became the foundation for Briggs & Stratton's subsequent galaxy of small gas engines.
A few Smith Flyers still exist, but this may be the very best. Its owner is Dr. Charles Sinatra of Jamestown, New York, who learned that a fellow local dentist, Dr. Fenner Lindblom, had owned the car from childhood. Lindblom's son, Dr. Palmer Lindblom, told Charles a family story.
"He told me about a wheel they had thrown in the back of their garage," he told. "At the time they'd had their farm out in the country many years ago, they had no electricity, so they took the fender off the Motor Wheel and used it to run their washing machine, with a belt drive. They used it for many years until they got electricity, and then they put it behind the coal bin. That's how I got it."
Charles restored it fabulously using original A.O. Smith blueprints. Based on his estimate of a 3.0-inch bore and 2.5-inch stroke, the displacement calculates to 17.67 cubic inches. Driving is entertaining, given that the engine is always running. A foot pedal controls what passes for brakes, a wooden stringer that presses the fenders, and pads beneath them, against the rear tires.
"It's a death trap, but it goes like stink. The only suspension is the flexing of the boards," Charles conceded. But the AACA judges loved it, bestowing the Flyer with a Grand National First award last year. It's now on loan to the Glenn Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport, New York. Curtiss, the American aviation and motorcycling pioneer, had a Smith Flyer as a boy.

This article originally appeared in the April, 2011 issue of Hemmings Motor News.